She’d known it in the back of her mind since Ellen’s birth but she hadn’t been ready to face it squarely. Her feelings kept changing: she didn’t know what she wanted or what she needed.
At first there wasn’t sufficient evidence to support her sprouting apprehensive consternation. Instinct was all she had: an intuition of darkening evil. There was nothing to which she could have given testimony.
He didn’t seem to have changed; he was still the same big hearty slab-hard hoarse sportin’ man who’d swept her off her feet with his contradictory streaks of considerate courtliness and bizarre vulgarity.
Sometimes the excitement still overwhelmed her and in their fevered thrashings she’d find herself thinking Yes, yes, my God, more-I want more and she’d wonder how she ever could have dreamed of giving him up.
Yet her unease intensified. When she held the vulnerable baby in her arms the qualms turned into outright fear, even though at first she could not define it.
Then she found out about the drug business.
It wasn’t a big dramatic moment. She didn’t catch him with glass envelopes full of white powder. It was nothing more than the appearance of his name in a newspaper article. No accusation; just journalistic innuendo:
Another name that has surfaced in the DEA’s investigations is that of Manhattan building contractor Albert LaCasse. It is not yet clear what connection, if any, LaCasse may have to the unfolding story of drug-trafficking indictments.…
No more than that. But it was the last of many segments; when it fell into place the pattern came instantly clear.
Perhaps it always had been: sometimes she wondered if she hadn’t deliberately avoided finding out, like an Albert Speer who wanted to be left alone with his architecture, not caring to know anything about Hitler that could compromise his relationship with his own conscience.
Bert came home that evening to the condominium on Third Avenue and she was waiting for him in icy calm and after one look at her face he said, “I see you’ve been reading the Daily News.”
“It’s all true, isn’t it.”
“No.” He was hanging his coat in the hall closet. “Where are Philip and Marjorie?”
“She’s in with the baby. I told him to go to the movies. I thought we’d better talk in private.”
“I pity you, Madeleine, if you think you’re ever getting truth for your quarter. They’re not peddling truth. They’re peddling newspapers.”
“You’re right to pity me. I’ve been such a pathetic fool.”
He tossed his jacket on the couch and jerked his tie loose and strode toward the wet bar; then he changed his mind and came to her.
She was at the window by the balcony. Snow on the railing had melted a bit during the day, then refrozen; it had a hard sooty crust.
He didn’t make the mistake of reaching out for her. He stood at arm’s length and tried to stare her down. He said, “If they had any proof, don’t you think I’d have been indicted by now? Listen-it’s all distortions. I’m in this fight with the unions. They’re animals. They’ll spread any kind of lies to cut you down.”
He continued to stare at her; he endeavored to smile.
“That’s all it is-a couple of union buttons got paid to peddle a bunch of garbage and the reporters ate it up like the pigs they are. You understand?”
Her stubborn silence argued with him. He threw his hands high in a violent gesture of exasperation and now the hoarse voice thundered at her:
“It’s a bunch of fucking lies. I don’t deal dope. You ought to know that. Have you ever seen me dealing dope? Come on. These creeps, I expect this kind of shit from them-but what hurts, what really hurts all the way down, it hurts me to see you believing this swill. That’s what hurts. That’s what I hate the bastards for.”
She was afraid of the violence in him. And it was a good act, full of bombast, almost persuasive.
But she didn’t believe him.
It all fitted too well. She’d spent the past two hours remembering things and putting them together. The suitcases full of cash-for “union payoffs.” The twin-engine planes on the Fort Keene airstrip with their furtive Latin American pilots. The obsessive secrecy that always cloaked his expeditions out of town with Jack Sertic and one or more bodyguards. The guns everywhere-in the apartment, in his Lexington Avenue suite of offices, in the Fort Keene cabin. And the getaway preparations in the leather jacket he always kept in the front hall closet, its lining sewn with a passport in a phony name and God knows how many cut diamonds. She hadn’t been prying; she’d been going through the closet yesterday looking for things to donate to the Armory benefit and she’d felt the hard flat passport in the jacket and its presence had made her examine the jacket more closely.
Strange how careless he could be about things like that when he was so cautious about other aspects of his security. Once a week a man with a heavy briefcase came in to sweep the apartment for electronic bugs. The unlisted phone numbers and the combination of the burglar alarm were changed at irregular intervals. All their cars were equipped with break-in alarm systems.
Yet he’d fooled her. Perhaps, albeit, with her subconscious connivance.…
After that there was no more ducking the decision. If only for Ellen’s sake, the only thing left was separation and divorce.
Of course he wasn’t going to like that.
She didn’t see any method of approaching the subject by subtle misdirection; the only way to handle things with Bert was to put them out in the open. He wasn’t tuned in to subtleties. You couldn’t hint around; you couldn’t ease up on him. To get his attention you had to hit him over the head.
She made the mistake of confronting him with it the night they returned to the apartment from the Armory benefit where they had shared the head table with the mayor and four Broadway-Hollywood stars and two noted philanthropists and their wives. Bert was in an elevated mood when they came home: his eyes were aglitter with a kind of vengeful satisfaction, for there was in him (she had discovered) a streak of childlike vindictiveness that was rewarded whenever he was treated like an equal by the sort of people who reeked of old money and spoke with Ivy League establishment drawls. Bert carried himself with a forceful kind of panache but there was no disguising the fact that he was a child of New Jersey, descended from lower-class immigrant Corsicans; he never pretended to be otherwise than nouveau riche but still it pleased him to dine not only with celebrities but especially with brahmins and aristocrats.
Seizing the chance to catch him in a good mood she evaded his embrace in the bedroom. “Let’s talk.”
“Later.”
“No, Bert. Now.”
“Come on. Let’s fool around.”
“I want to take the baby away for a while.”
He tried to absorb that. “Aagh,” he said, dismissing it. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“I need a change.”
“For Christ’s sake.”
“Don’t dismiss it like that. We’ve got to talk about this.”
“Talk about what? You been smoking something or what?”
“We’re going away. The baby and I. We’re not staying here any more.”
He watched her very closely. He hardly seemed to be breathing.
She plunged on. “We’re just going away for a while, that’s all. Call it whatever you want. Say I want to get my act together. Say I need an ocean voyage. Call it a vacation. I need air.”
“Call it leaving me. Call it walking out on me. What the fuck are you talking about? You’re my wife. Ellen’s my daughter. What’s this you need a change, you need air, you want to go away for a while? What’s this shit? Who the fuck you think you’re talking to?”
“Please don’t make a bigger thing out of it than it is. I just need a little space to breathe for a while.”
He sat down on the edge of the bed and began to unlace his shoes. He kicked them off and stared at them. Finally he looked up at her and she could see his disbelief and she realized her tentative approach had been cowardly. It would have been better to tell him the truth from the outset.